The Unreliability of History

It is a truism to state that most of human history has not been written down--and
that which has been has ordinarily been falsified, exaggerated, distorted and
simplified for a variety of non historical purposes. Michel Foucault demonstrated
how history up until the Enlightenment was basically monarchical, seeing every-
thing in simple linear terms; the monarch was the ruling power and historians
wrote with the intention of glorifying him. After the Enlightenment, Foucault sug-
gests, our more modern concern with underlying trends appeared. However, ac-
cording to Foucault, this was with the intention of empowering the aristocracy
who had been sidelined by the church and the King. The aim of exposing this hid-
den history was to show the way in which, since the Frankish conquest, the
Gaulish aristocrats had entered into the church, acquired knowledge of Latin and
Roman law and become advisers to the King. This had led to the decline of the
traditional French aristocracy and the point of this new history was to call upon
the First Estate to reclaim its birthright.

Today we have leftist history, rightist history, the history of the conquered and of
the conquerors. We have Marxist history, bourgeois history and revisionist history.
There is also the history of origins. According to this, everything has its starting
point in a clear and well defined moment. For example there is the moment when
spoken language first appeared and the moment when the first language was set
down in written form. Most historians believe that Sumerian cuneiform was the
first written language, but new discoveries in the Balkans cast serious doubt on
this. The Vinca culture was Europe's biggest prehistoric civilization and 4000 years
before the CE it had achieved high levels of sophistication in various areas includ-
ing metalwork, pottery and urban planning. It seems the women were even highly
fashion conscious and wore something akin to the modern mini skirt! Most inter-
esting of all, a kind of proto-language appears on more than 1000 artifacts dis-
covered (an example of which can be seen in the picture above). Was this a fully
developed written language in every day use around 2000 years before the writ-
ten script in Sumeria? (which bears no similarity to the Vinca script). Experts are
in disagreement about this: some say, the Vinca script is no more than a primitive
symbolic script, others are more ready to argue for the script's status as a lan-
guage. In any case, it is certain that the vested interests of academia do not
change long cherished ideas easily, so if the Vinca script should prove to be an
early language, the proponents of this idea will have their work cut out to prove
it.

Finally, the essential point is not whether the Vinca script predates the Sumerian
one. Rather, it is to ask ourselves how many of the arbitrary points in time that
we learn in history really represents "an origin". The human mind likes to think in
easily manageable time periods and events. Long millennia, when change hap-
pened imperceptibly isn't exciting or sexy enough for the historical taste. How-
ever, it is likely enough that this is the way that things really happened.